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Tim Thomas's Blog

Thursday Apr 16, 2009

I would like to point people to my favorite StarOffice plugin, the StarOffice Minimiser. You can get it here, and I do so wish that everyone would use it. Many presentations I download now exceed 10MB in size, and some exceed 20MB, and this is usually because they are full of JPEGS
that have a resolution more suited to the sides of buildings than a
presentation!

You can use the StarOffice Minimiser repeatedly on the same slide set as you add/change slides (i.e. new images will be minimized, previously minimised images will not be minimized again). There are also options to delete hidden slides and removes notes as part of the process, if desired.

Monday Nov 17, 2008

[This article was originally posted on Nov 17th and updated on Nov 21st.]

I have done a lot of work with Solaris and ZFS on the Sun Fire X45x0 server but now I am now working on something a little different as I have a project where I am running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 on a Sun Fire X4540.

ONLY IF this is a new system and/or if this is the first time you have installed Windows on this system do the following after you have installed Windows and BEFORE you install Storage Foundation:

1. Bring up the Windows Storage Manager and make sure it finds all 48 disks.

2. Delete any partitions on disks other than the boot disk. THIS DESTROYS ANY DATA on the disks. You don't have to anything to disks with no partitions on them, just the act of LVM finding them makes them available to windows.

Who do this ? The X4540 ships with Solaris pre-installed and a pre-configured ZFS storage pool. Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows is essentially Veritas Volume Manager. We install Windows over the top of Solaris but the rest of the disks are untouched. Under windows, when Veritas Volume Manager scans the disks it sees something is on the disks, plays safe and marks them as unusable. I found no way to override this behavior. The standard Windows LVM does not have this issue and allows you to tidy the disks up. You need to follow this procedure before you install Storage Foundation as it replaces the Windows LVM.

Using Storage Foundation

I really liked using this software. It was easy to install (though the install takes a long time) and easy to configure and use. The X4540 has 48 disks which can be challenging to manage, but the Veritas software makes this relatively easy. The wizard for creating volumes is great, allowing you to manually select disks so that you are striping or mirroring across controllers for example..or you can let the software decide, but I prefer to maintain manual control of how my volumes are laid out.

This is the Disk View:

This is the Volume View:

Here are a couple of shots of the Volume Wizard. The first one shows the disk selection page and there is the option to allows the software to Autoselect...though I went for Manual:

This shows the page where you choose the type of volume to create:

One interesting thing I learnt from this UI is how Windows maps the disks in the X4540. Windows presents the disks as Disk0->Disk47 which is not very informative if you wish to build volumes across controllers. Via the Veritas GUI I was able to see that the six SAS controllers in the X4540 are mapped as P0->P5 and then we have eight disks on each controller T0->T7. C and L are always 0. You can see this in the first screenshot of the Volume Wizard.

I built a RAID-10 Volume and a RAID-5 Volume. To help me plan, I printed out a copy of my Sun Fire X4540 Disk Planner (which was designed for Solaris) and changed the column labels to P0->P5 and the row labels to C0->C7. I labeled the boxes Disk0->Disk47, starting at the top left I worked down the first column, then returned to the top of the next column and working down that and so on.

A Final Note: Disk Write Caches

The X4540 ships with the disk write caches on. The Volume Manager will warn you about this. Disk write caches are volatile and you could loose data in event of a power outage. If you don't have UPS protection then you can switch the disks write caches off using the Windows Device Manager. Note that Solaris ZFS is cool with disk write caches on as it flushes them out when it periodically syncs the file system.

Thursday Sep 25, 2008

[Update Sept 26th: I have revised this from the initial posting on
Sept 25th. The hot spares have been laid out in a tidier way and I have included
an improved script which is a little more generalized.]

The
server
has six controllers, each with 8 disks. In the planner, the first
controller is c0, but the controller numbering
will not start at c0 in all cases: if you installed Solaris off an ISO
image they will run from c1->c6; if Solaris is installed with
Jumpstart then they will run c0->c5, in one case I have seen the
first controller as c4. Whatever the first controller is, the others
will follow in sequence.

I assumed that
mirrored boot disks are desirable, so I allocated two disk for the OS.

ZFS is happy with stripes of dissimilar lengths in a pool, but I
like all the stripes in a pool to be the same length, so I allocated hot
spares across the controllers to enable me to build Eight
5 disk RAID-Z stripes. There is one hot spare per controller.

This
script creates the pool as described above. The required arguments are
the desired name of the pool and the name of the first controller. It
does a basic check to see that you are on a Sun Fire X4540.

#! /bin/sh##set -x##Make ZFS storage pools on a Sun Fire X4540 (Thor).#This WILL NOT WORK on Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper) as #the boot disk locations and controller numbering #is different.##Need two arguments:## 1. name of pool# 2. name of first controller e.g c0#

I
have used this layout on my systems for over a year now in the labs,
pounding the heck out of it. The first two controllers are marginally less busy as they
support both a boot disk and hotspare, but I have seen very even
performance across all the data disks.

So
far, I have not
lost a disk so I am probably way over a cautious with my hot
spares...famous last words ..but if you want to reduce the number of
hot spares to four, then it is
easy to modify the script by taking spares and adding them to the
stripes. If you want to do this, since the first two controllers are
marginally less loaded than the other controllers, I recommend you
modify the script to extend the
stripes on rows t6 & t7 as below . You need to
make this decision up front before building the pool as you cannot
change the length of a RAID-Z stripe once
the pool is built.

The zpool create command in the script would now look like this...the modified lines are in bold text.

Tuesday Sep 23, 2008

The SunFire X4500 (commonly known as Thumper) got a facelift a few months ago and the new version is the SunFire X4540. The X4540 has to a large degree been re-architected, and has new CPUs, more memory and a new I/O subsystem. There are still 48 disks, but the controller numbering is different and we now have four bootable disk slots vs only two in the X4500.

Now, I need to draw a picture when planning ZFS storage pools with so many disks so I just uploaded my SunFire X4540 disk planner in PDF and OpenOffice formats. There is no rocket science here, it just helps you draw a picture, but I find it useful. It is an update of a similar doc I created for the X4500.

Sunday Jul 06, 2008

I have been using a script for a while to configure VNC server displays for Solaris Express (Nevada) and I just found out that the same script works on Solaris 10 5/08 (Solaris 10 Update 5) as it includes Xvnc also.

I always do a full install of Solaris. If you don't, then maybe Xvnc will not be installed on your system. You can easily check:

# pkginfo | grep xvncsystem SUNWxvnc X11/VNC server

You run the below script once after OS installation is complete. It sets up two VNC displays and you connect to them with a VNC client as <hostname>:1 and <hostname>:2 . The second display is shared.

#!/bin/sh## config_Xvnc_s10+snv.sh## Run this script once after OS installation is completed.## This has been tested with Solaris 10 5/08 and Solaris Express (Nevada) b87 onwards#

The displays persist when you disconnect the VNC client, so you can come back to a session at later time and all the windows and applications will be as you left them. Any jobs you kicked off will have continued to run.

You can get VNC client software from http://www.realvnc.com. There is a Free Edition and an enhanced Personal Edition for which you need a license.

If you have an older release of Solaris 10 than 5/08 then take a look at my earlier blog entry about how to configure VNC.